“Look, Mom, I’m Saving Women!”

A long time ago as I was leaving a romantic relationship that had gone sour, my mother said to me, “You gotta lay down to be a doormat.” This old adage goes along with “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

That’s what the supporters of the newly reintroduced Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) are all about. So many women are laying down to special-interest groups who don’t glorify their power but highlight their weaknesses. They get sucked in by the talking points and rhetoric instead of thinking about how they want to be represented.

These special-interest groups are now vilifying conservative members of Congress who won’t support reauthorizing VAWA as enemies to women, staying in that same now-tired refrain of the war on women. They say conservatives want more women to be raped and they want easy penalties for sex offenders.

Are they serious?

Recently, my 5th grade daughter brought home an assignment she had completed that was all about discrimination of black people. It struck me as highly outdated.

My daughter doesn’t think of people by their skin color. She has grown up knowing nothing but the fact that we ALL have different skin tones. Some people are pasty white. Some people are tan. Some people have dark skin. Some people don’t.

Her generation has grown up with diverse faces in commercials, on children’s programming, on cereal boxes, and in popular movies. They have never lived with stigmas attached to mixed race couples or believing the kid in the wheelchair is weird.

As a society, we’ve done an excellent job of making sure kids have this drilled into their heads – we are all the same and all equal. For some, we’re equal because God sees us no other way. For some, we’re equal because we know we all do things the same way. We all cry when we’re hurt or sad. We eat when we are hungry. We all want to be happy. Calling out our differences at this point actually could cause more questions instead of understanding.

So when women’s groups try to highlight a woman’s weaknesses in the name of gaining political capital and the celebrated “feather-in-your-cap” accomplishment of getting YET another unnecessary bill RE-authorized, it really smacks of political theater as another battle in the war on women, and a tired one at that. Why must we continue to highlight our differences when we are all supposed to be equal?

“Look at me, Mom, I’m saving women!” they say, when in fact it is really them who are creating a victim mentality in women.

Gloria Steinem spent years fighting for “equal rights” for women. Now, as a society, we must have “special rights” for minorities. And it all goes back to that “Look what I did” culture we’ve created in our society.

There is a video on YouTube posted by the group Women United that tries to illustrate how mean and evil Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is when she says we don’t need special rights as women. She says we are already protected by the law.

Guess what? She’s right!

All minorities are protected equally under the law. Breaking the law is illegal. Period.

So, when politicians introduce (or in this case, reintroduce) redundant bills in the name of protecting a group that’s already legally protected, they not only waste taxpayer money but they create an even bigger wedge between American citizens that’s downright despicable.

Women, fight back against this divisiveness. Don’t get sucked in by the “Yeah, we gotta protect women!!” battle cry. Don’t lay down to their political posturing. When we do that, we actually make all women much weaker – the exact opposite of what you are trying to do.

Call them on their tactics and show what powerful women really look like.

2 Responses to “Look, Mom, I’m Saving Women!”

What a wonderfully worded and focused outlook! Marijo says “So many women are laying down to special-interest groups who don’t glorify their power but highlight their weaknesses.”
We want our daughters to believe in their power. Just as Dr. Ben Carson’s* mother expected him to trust in his own self reliance…it begins with an expectation. * http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4353213